"Oh, just friendly interest," he had replied, slapping his jacket pocket. "Where did I put my cigarette case?... We _are_ friends, aren't we?"

"Rather less so when you go chattering about me."

"Sorry, old man," he had replied contritely, though his contrition had been less for his blabbing than that I apparently had taken it amiss. "I didn't think--you didn't tell me not--it slipped out----"

"Well, well--no great harm's done. But if I were you--" if I had hesitated it was merely for a private and subtle relish "--I'd take a memory powder, to use an expression of Miss Windus's."

(You will remember how I had come to overhear that expression, and you may see, by turning back, the precise context of the allusion.)

Archie had been sitting in his favourite att.i.tude, with his stockinged feet against the pilaster of the fireplace. He had twinkled again.

"I don't think it _can_ be Miss Windus," he had chuckled again. "Anybody can see you can't stand her."

"Oh? Sorry I've allowed that to appear."

"And the college isn't exactly swarming with girls," he had continued.

I had told him that he was dragging the college in entirely on his own responsibility.

"Oh no!" he had said promptly, with a far too cunning glance at me. "You don't put me off like that, old boy! I've got you down to that, and I'm going to hold you to it! Serve you right for your dashed secretiveness!

So if it isn't Miss Windus, and it isn't Miss Soames----"

At that I had been able quite calmly to jest. I had fetched up a laugh.

"Steady a minute," I had said. "If you're really bent on going into the Sherlock Holmes business you'll have to do it properly, you know--give reasons for your eliminations. Accuracy's everything. Let's have your reason for ruling Miss Soames out."

"Good old Jeff," he had remarked, laughing; "accurate even in his jokes!

Well, say Evie's a young twenty, and you're a d.a.m.ned experienced old thirty--how will _that_ do?"

I believe, taken with all the rest, that it had seemed to him perfectly conclusive.

"That's better," I had approved. "I only meant that if you're going to be methodical you must _be_ methodical, that's all. Good mental training for you, my boy."

"So it is," he had agreed, with the forthcoming examination in his mind.

"I say--we'll have a shorthand speed-test presently--but first I'm going to drag this out of you...."

And by-and-by I had all but made the confession that it was Miss Causton whom I adored from a distance and hesitated to approach.

Another contributory source to this oddest freak of my life was the terms on which I had returned to the college. That wide and unexpected development of my new studies was no explanation to anybody but myself; I had confessed myself, through Archie, to be in love; and the more closely I applied myself to my mysterious work the less mysterious did my whole conduct appear. Yet on the whole, even if Miss Causton had returned at once, I might at the last have feared the hazard with one at once so suspiciously open and problematically deep as she; and there was no allowing matters to remain as they were. There was only Miss Windus for it.

You see the mess I had landed myself in.

Yet my unhappiness in all this was only a part of a general change that was quickly leavening me throughout. It was a change altogether for the better. I was sick, sick of shifts and tricks and meannesses. I was no less sick of them in myself than I was when I encountered them in the Sutts and Polwheles among whom my life was pa.s.sed. I panted for a clearer air and a more s.p.a.cious prospect; I panted for these things because Evie had loosened the band that had confined the wings of my own spirit. And with my own spirit thus freed, I would find a way to escape from the cage of my circ.u.mstances. Once I had done with that old life I would have done with it for ever. And, strange as it may seem, it was because hope was at last greyly and tardily dawning for me that I entered into my last despicable tortuousness with Kitty Windus.

II

For as I got deeper into my studies I began to see in it nothing less than the finger of Providence that I had failed in the second part of the examination in Method. That frustration altered the whole course of my life. I am, of course, speaking in the light of subsequent events, but I see now what a mere pa.s.s would have meant--a sort of success no doubt--but a success in a narrow and short-reaching attempt.

Up to that time my plan had been to qualify myself by means of certificates, to find a billet elsewhere, and then, with Rixon Tebb & Masters' recommendation of steadiness and sobriety, really to begin in some firm where promotion was possible otherwise than by our bottle-neck of a junior clerkship. I had actually had the choice of no less than two such firms, and had been already wondering what I should do with my extra twelve shillings a week--for I should have begun at thirty shillings.

And then I had failed.

Well, heaven be thanked for it. In that failure I sounded, for the last time--but no; for the last time but one--the ba.s.s-string of my poverty.

For now, as I saw my new work gradually unfolding, it sometimes so excited me that I could hear my own heart thumping in my breast. Do you know that feeling--that in your brain there is already born, and growing apace, an idea that you do not believe to be guessed at by any creature in the world except yourself? As a matter of fact I now know that my idea was being simultaneously worked upon elsewhere. Sir Julius (then "Judy") Pepper was pegging away at it in his back room in Endsleigh Gardens, hardly a mile from where I brooded over it myself; and if you have never heard of the a.s.sociation of Jeffries and Pepper you know very little about these things. Still, all was in darkness then save for that single ray far ahead that seemed to indicate a way out; and even now I have only just begun my life's work--the keying up to concert pitch of certain branches of commercial distribution that, by the time I and my successors have finished, will make men wonder how such a phenomenon as, say, the railway strike of last year could ever have been possible.

Nor was this deepest peace that the man of action knows--his certainty about what his task in the world must be--the whole of my spirit's unexpected re-birth. This held out the promise of material--and shall I say "ethical?"--well-being; and my eyes were now opened to more than that. I hesitate to call this new thing "religion." I would rather define it as the clear and immutable knowledge that all things _do_ work together to an end, good, bad or morally unconnoted. It was a perception of powers and forces, not at variance, but working in harmony towards some cosmic consummation. I don't think that is religion. I don't think it would save a soul. But it not only saved, but made altogether its own, my reason. I believed in the power and divinity of a thing, if not in those of a Being. And I believe that I should have got further even than that.

And if it be true that we treat the world as we are treated by it, this changed my att.i.tude to all with whom I came into contact. I am not thinking now of Kitty Windus, for she, poor soul, was but an episode, though one I have found is hard enough to make away with. I am thinking of Sutt, of Polwhele, of the proprietor of my public-house, of the drivers and porters of my restaurant, of the men and women, seen and to be seen no more, who pa.s.sed me in the streets. And I am thinking of Evie Soames.

For it was side by side with her sweetness that I conceived all this authority and strength and vision to exist. It was all, I knew not how, hers--hers and mine. I could not successfully resolve a problem nor work out an equation but something within me cried, "That is ours, my love!--something seized from the limbo of things-not-known-yet, for you, dear, and for me!" I could now even bear to work away from her, in another room of the college, among the files of the Patent Office, at my own place. When her face rose, as it ever did, between me and my paper or page, I knew peace now, not jealousy. Had I put into words the thoughts that then filled me those words would have been, "Yes, my own--you see what I'm doing--it is for us, and it won't be long--go away, sweetheart, but not very far." And so I dreamed harder and worked harder than I have ever done in my life, and both came easily to me, because I had at last clearly seen my goal.

Yet you are not to suppose that I was not unwinkingly wakeful too. This was my inner life, and it informed, but did not abate, the vigilance of my outer one. I think that three times out of four I knew (at first at any rate) when Archie had been to Woburn Place, and perhaps twice out of four when he had sought a lower pleasure elsewhere. It would take too long to tell you how I ascertained all this. I did so under a mask of casualness that practice and my new-born hope had now made quite easy.

And so I come to my acceptance by Kitty Windus.

Espionage upon Woburn Place was only a part, and by far the lesser part, of it. I had my impossible position to explain. And not only had I to explain it, but my original lie had left me only one other way of explaining it--the giving up of Evie once for all. That I could have more easily done months back than I could now that hope had brought her so (I speak comparatively) tantalisingly near. I admit that the chance that I might be introduced at Woburn Place as Miss Windus's _fiancee_ did weigh, and horribly. I no longer hated her. I pitied her. I do not mean that this pity was in the least degree akin to love in that word's sense as between man and woman; but by salving a little my self-content it did, practically, help me to carry the thing out. But I swear, however much I may appear to put myself upon the defensive in doing so, that of itself the prospect of Woburn Place would not have swayed me.

I have not the heart to remember the earlier stages of my duplicity. Too many crawling things lie beneath that stone of my life for me to wish to turn it over. Let me summarise by saying that, by a slow and nicely calculated relaxing of my stiffness, and a gradual and lingering and gratuitous prolongation ever and again of certain opportunities of intercourse, I had, by the beginning of March, so counterbalanced my former aversion that, in a word, anything might happen, and at any moment.

Poor, lonely, starved spinster heart! I have far more ruth for what I did to you than for what I did to another!

But let me, before I go on, see whether there was anything during the months of January and February that I may not omit.... No, I think there is little. Miss Causton still remained away; I pursued my new investigations; that segregation of newness of the first-year students relaxed a little, but without affecting that slight unconscious coming together of the older ones that it had brought about; and I think Archie Merridew divided his time between Woburn Place and Leicester Square pretty equally. I think that is all. I pa.s.s on.

It was in Lincoln's Inn Fields that I entered into a pledge with Kitty Windus that I had no intention of ever redeeming. I had not thought when I had left the college that night that it would come so quickly. I had planned a long walk, and, pa.s.sing through Great Turnstile, had come upon Miss Windus looking into the window of an antique shop. I had stopped and gazed with her, and then, presently moving away, we had pa.s.sed together into the square.

She told me afterwards that she had been merely aimlessly wandering, having been to Woburn Place the evening before and fearing to weary her welcome there by going again the next night; but I did not know this then. Therefore, when presently she stopped at the corner where the street leading to Kingsway now is and said, "Well, I think I'll go back," I was a little surprised. Then I understood and laughed.

"I'm so sorry," I said, "I thought this was your way. I don't know that it's particularly mine--I was only taking a stroll--so if you don't mind I'll walk back with you."

Thereupon we turned back into the Fields.

It was this mutually made discovery that neither of us was pressed for time that brought simultaneously into our minds some slight self-consciousness that for the first time in our lives we should be thus killing an hour in one another's company. Her own embarra.s.sment presently gave expression to this.

"How nice," she said, after we had walked half the length of the central garden railings in silence, "to feel sometimes that you haven't got to talk if you don't want to!"

The remark, commonplace as it was, gave me a new glimpse of her. I knew that she read a better cla.s.s of novel than my Evie, and with the results you might suppose. I don't seriously believe that Evie's "scions of n.o.ble blood" and the rest of her novelette paraphernalia had any point of contact with real life for her, but Miss Windus carried over the triteness she got from her reading into her thought and speech.

Therefore, since I myself, though no eloquent speaker, believe that tongues were made to talk with, I again laughed a little.

"Yes," I replied, "provided always that you aren't silent merely because you've nothing to say."

I think this penetration, such as it was, struck her with quite remarkable force; and, as the novels provided no reply to it, she was again silent for a time. We were approaching the corner of Great Turnstile again, but I don't think she noticed it. We turned down by Stone Buildings and began to complete the circuit of the Fields.

"Mr Merridew said you were very clever," she remarked at last. "What _do_ you study all by yourself in the senior cla.s.sroom, Mr Jeffries?"

she asked, the quizzical little triangles of her eyes turned up to mine in the light of a lamp that hung like a beacon over the garden railings.

She wore a plaid Inverness cape and a boat-shaped hat that night, I remember, and would doubtless have worn rubber heels had those articles been invented. Never woman made a slighter physical appeal to man than she.

"I'm not quite sure myself yet," I replied, as truthfully as made no matter. "Part of it at any rate is human nature in business."